Joomla Day Las Vegas... The Aftermath

Past weekend the Joomladay Las Vegas was held and we want to thank all who attended for making Joomla Day Las Vegas the success that it was!

After a few technical snafus on Friday, we had an unbelievable series of classes and sessions that were educational, uplifting, or just plain interesting. We learned a lot about the community and its needs, and we will see some of those ideas implemented over the coming months.

Starting with a group exercise that got the crowd moving, talking and thinking, Gunner kept the energy high and the solid information flowing.

We had excellent user and presenter-led breakout sessions on such topics as (and this is not a complete list):

Templating

Development of extensions

Developing the core code

Use of the Joomla framework

CCK--comparison of ZOO and K2

Joomla SxSW showdown site with Steve Fisher

Kunena with Oliver Ratzesburger

Google Open Source Programs and Summer of Code with Leslie Hawthorn

Event calendars

Community building

eCommerce

SEO

Performance and hosting

Security

The future of Joomla (1.6 and beyond)

and the ever popular "Stump Louis" (he remains unstumped)

We hope the Joomladay attendees had the same awesome time as I did, and hope to see you next year. Before I start thanking people, realize that like a good Oscar acceptance speech... people are forgotten because the speaker is so overwhelmed with gratitude. Toni Mari (who wrote most of this blog) is overwhelmed with gratitude for your enthusiastic participation in this event, I can only second this since this Joomladay was really mindblowing!

Thank you to Oliver Ratzesburger, Cory Webb, Steve Fisher, TJ Baker and all the other ad-hoc presenters who traveled to Las Vegas on their own just to contribute and enhance our event.

We are forever in the debt of Louis Landry, Rob Schley, Elin Waring, Anthony Ferrara, Mark Dexter, Ryan Ozimek, Steve Burge, Victor Drover, Aaron St. George and Ron Severdia for the ultra-strong working group/dev team/OSM showing. Our attendees had access to a wealth of deep project knowledge.

Thank you to Gunner and his team of Mike and Matt, who made Joomla Day energetic and yet organized. Gunner kept us on track when it seemed impossible. Gunner came highly recommended and he and the team did not disappoint. Let's everyone shoot out some positive vibes that we can coax him back! It won't hurt to throw a little love at the PCBSD folks who made sure we were flush with attractive headgear.

Thank you to all the folks who pitched in when we needed a hand with T-shirts or registration, or just carrying things. Without you, the day could not have flowed so smoothly.

Thank you to Erica Joy Baker and Leslie Hawthorn for making sure we had our social networking launched and flowing. You can see what we're up to using the twitter search for hashtag #jdayvegas and you can catch the recap tweet by tweet at http://twitter.com/joomladayvegas . None of this would be possible without the hard work of Erica Joy who used the @joomla twitter account to create a live-blog-like stream of information.

The Joomla Flickr Group has a great set of JDay photos and anyone can upload and share their personal shots at http://flickr.com/groups/Joomla , and we're trying to get a flickr tag going of jdayvegas09 . Ryan Ozimek has graciously volunteered to give that tag a little kickstart so there are already a bunch of photos properly tagged.

We definitely learned and grew as a community, and are energized for next year's planning. To that end, email Toni Marie if you're interested in the local Joomla User Group for the Las Vegas metro area, and put "jdayvegas" in the subject for me so I can filter and focus.

Thank you again for your support of our event and of the Joomla project. Your interest and insights fuel the future of Joomla.